A Night at the Loft, the Dance Party That Spawned All Other Dance Parties

On a Sunday evening in the middle of the three-day weekend, about 300 New Yorkers began their pilgrimage through freezing temperatures and black-iced sidewalks to converge on the East Village. They arrived at a door marked only by four balloons. All official offices would be closed the next day for President’s Day, but everyone was there to celebrate the other holiday of this past week, Valentine’s Day. They were also there to celebrate the birthday of an old friend—not so much a person as a beloved entity.

Valentine’s Day in 1970, some 44 years ago this past Sunday, marked the birth of David Mancuso’s Loft, the party from whence all other modern dance music emanates. This is not an exaggeration. From Larry Levan’s Paradise Garage to Frankie Knuckles’s Warehouse parties in Chicago, from the Hacienda to Berghain to that illegal loft space you went to the other weekend in Bushwick (or Berlin, or Budapest), whether you move to disco, house, acid, techno, trap, dubstep or whatever new dance genres might arise—all can claim the Loft as paterfamilias. And while Loft parties are thrown intermittently in London and Tokyo, New York City will always be the Loft’s home (3-5 parties a year still happen here), even if that home has changed often over the past few decades, from SoHo to Alphabet City to its current spot in the East Village.

My Valentine and I ascended the stairs, and the scent of Nag Champa filled our nostrils as we entered a space that at once feels like your high school prom, a birthday party, and a church social: instantly familiar and warm. From the dancefloor, I could hear the familiar stomp of the Winners’ “Get Ready for the Future”, a song made famous by Mancuso (who, it should be noted, is no longer the DJ at the Loft) and compiled on the now-rare 2CD set. Against one wall was a shrine to “our Ancestors,” a memorial for those who danced before us.

The Loft’s soundsystem is infamous, a set of seven Klipschorn floorstanding speakers arrayed in a circle around the dancefloor that takes most of the weekend to set up and remains the gold standard for most club systems. And yet the Loft’s sound is deceptive. It is immersive and crystalline, revealing details in records you might have heard a hundred times on earbuds, but it is not loud. The bass does not concuss your insides, and your ears do not ring with tinnitus the next day. Numerous times, we found ourselves able to have a conversation in a regular speaking voice, even while standing right in front of one of the Klipschorns.

The Loft is the source of every dance party and yet no dance party feels quite like the Loft. There’s no mixing of records, the music instead left to transport you to an otherworldly realm. After every song, the crowd breaks into a round of applause, the next record already gearing up to take the dancers to another place. Some Loft members bring hand percussion to add their own flavor to the tracks. As we danced, rattles, tambourines and go-go bells offered their own polyrhythms, revealing new spaces within the grooves.

As I crawl closer to my 40th birthday, there are countless nights out in underground DIY spaces in Brooklyn where I feel like the oldest (and crankiest) person in the room, annoyed at standing in a puddle of beer and having smoke blown in my face for a night of music delivered through a blown PA system. It’s coupled with a nascent fear that perhaps I’m growing too old to participate in music or worse still, to keep up. But a night at the Loft puts it back in perspective. Even at a quick glance around the room, I can spot revelers who have been coming to the Loft since its inception—meaning they’ve been dancing since before I was born. It’s an inspiring sight to see. There’s nothing to suggest that as we grow older, we can’t still be an active participant in such a celebration of music, dancing, and love.

As tonight’s iteration of the Loft nears its climax, Arthur Russell’s ecstatic dance single (recorded as Dinosaur) “Go Bang” sends us all into a lather. At the track’s frenzied peak, hundreds of red and pink balloons descend down onto the dancefloor and it’s not hard to imagine myself at a young age at this moment, gleefully batting at them. The Joubert Singers’ “Stand on the Word” follows, its shouted chorus of “That’s how the Good Lord works!” sounding as if in that moment, moving together as one to that beat, we might all be members of that choir.